Goodbye To All That

Osama bin Laden ... Muammar Gaddafi ... Kim Jong-il ... George Papandreou ... Rebekah Brooks: 2011 was a bad year for people with difficult-to-spell names.

Of course, recent years have in general been bad for people with difficult-to-spell names, although the majority of them would seem superficially to have had a better year than usual, thanks in no small part to the Arab Spring which brought peace, love and understanding to Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Libya.

The troubled history of Iraq culminated in the triumphant withdrawal of U. S. Forces and would certainly have been marked by mass public celebration had the crowds not been forced to disperse to make way for ambulances. Even now, as Sordel scowls in a corner typing out his inexcusably jaundiced nut-binding of 2011, the power-sharing government in Baghdad is celebrating several minutes of successful cooperation as President Nuri-Kamal al-Maliki's Shiite faction seeks Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi on charges of running a death squad.

One way or another, 2012 looks to be another memorable year for people with difficult-to-spell names.

Elsewhere, people with difficult-to-spell names agreed to merge them in an effort to dodge the jinx hanging over their heads. Hence 'Merkozy': a different making-of-the-beast-with-two-backs than Shakespeare can have anticipated, yet one equally likely to result in someone being smothered under a bolster before morning. Still, no one said that France and Germany have actually to be at war with one another to be mutually ruinous; it just helped.

Comedy Moment of the Year (for those who can see past the oddly pedestrian circumstance of a bride being upstaged by her sister's bottom at the Wedding of the Century) was the U.S. playing "Mister, can we have our ball back?" with their RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone and Iran. What's next? Asking for their bullets back from Pakistan?

Anyway, Sordel looks forward to 2012 with one lingering concern. If education continues on the path it is currently following, all names will become generally more difficult to spell. As trends go, it's not exactly encouraging.

Rolling the Dice

Back in the days when the Rubik's Cube was young, Sordel's approach to this small bundle of polychrome frustration was as follows: if the current situation was not to one's liking, give it another turn and hope that it improves. Now in the grand scheme of things, this is an imperfect approach to solving a Rubik's Cube ... but it is an absolutely disastrous method for solving foreign policy.

Barack Obama has got the red side solved by turning the United States back into a Republican stronghold. Now, like most presidents who have been made redundant by electoral failure, he is looking across the sea. Rather than concentrate on Afghanistan or Iraq or Pakistan or Guantanamo Bay, however, he has set his sights on Libya. According to the New York Times this was much against his better judgement, but he seems to have been bounced into it by the French, who in this demonstrate an inclination to ironic comedy for which they have not as a nation been previously noted.

("You want some "Freedom Fries" with that, mon ami?")

Naturally there are some who are cheering on this latest excursion on the basis that it protects the fragile seedling of democracy. Quite what species these seedlings are that are peeking out from the oil-drenched soil of the Middle East is, however, open to question, as is the strength of feeling behind the protests that accompany them. After all, when thousands of people marched against the Iraq war, this was regarded by Tony Blair as mere grumbling, but if a hundred people raise a banner in Africa we are evidently ready to recognise their government.

If three men and a dog claimed that the town Sordel lives in had fallen into rebel hands, the BBC would colour it a different colour on a map and start describing the dog as "regional governor".

Whatever the rights and wrong of the two sides in the civil war for Libya, we can be sure that ordinary citizens with very little interest in politics will now be killed by both sides, and by the foreign airstrikes. With Obama's promise of "no ground troops" (a promise that immediately seems impossible to keep) we are looking to the rebels to provide an effective police system capable of restraining a Qadaffi regime that will inevitably conceal itself within the general population.

In the meantime, if the U.S. is serious about protecting freedom-loving innocents from an oppressor's rain of fire, it can do so by stopping bombing children gathering wood in Afghanistan.

Maybe finish one of our other wars before starting another?

Merry Christmas (War Ain't Over)

Staunch though his championship may be of the popular hate figure Peter Mandelson, Sordel's defence budget also extends to chinooks for Simon Cowell. Cowell (in the popular imagination at least) is stricken this holiday season as a consequence of the bird flipped collectively in his direction by the people of Great Britain when they made "Killing in the Name" number one this Christmas.

"Fuck you," chorused the Facebook masses: "I won't do what you tell me!"

This is a pretty remarkable consensus given the fact that the bankers took their bonuses, the MPs refused to give back their swag (or the bags that it came in) and we are still (still!) prosecuting two unjust wars overseas. Way to go, People of Britain ... you really managed to focus out the Pervasive Evanescent this holiday season.

Cowell, if only because he scowls so much and wears a lot of black, is good casting for a pantomime villain, and - in the dim apprehension of a great many Rage downloaders - cheating him of the top of the festive chart is the equivalent of stick a large bomb down his underpants and running away chortling.

Apparently all that was needed to motivate the campaign against the harmless Joe McElderry and his largely pleasant single was the perception that Cowell's X Factor had locked up the "coveted" throne at the top of the hit parade and was preventing other musical acts (JLS, Cheryl Cole, Alexandra Buck, Leona Lewis and the X Factor Charity single, presumably) from getting their fair time in the spotlight. Next week the big chart showdown, for example, is scheduled to be Cole vs. McElderry. Assuming that the Facebook community is resting on its laurels and collecting its winnings from William Hill, you wouldn't need the National Weather Center's help to forecast business as usual for 2010.

Cowell, like the Formerly Red Baron, is with us so untiringly that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse may as well advertise for a keyboardist & second drummer before heading into the coming decade as a sextet.

Before we bid a fond farewell to 2009, however, it is worth shunning the sherry long enough to remember with due sobriety the many British families bereaved this year as a consequence of the brace of conflicts continuing in the absence of an effective Facebook campaign to end them. Sordel will be remembering in his prayers also the families of the many Soviet troops killed and injured in Afghanistan as a consequence of the U.S.-backed insurgency there.

Killing In The Name indeed.

And on that cheerful note Sordel bids a Merry Xmas to all his reader.

Nutts to (Gordon) Brown

Until the birth of New Labour it was comparatively rare for a British politician to be assassinated. These days, the only job more perilous is being a member of the Columbian judiciary.

Consider Alan Johnson, once considered the brightest and best in the Labour ranks.

This, of course, is like being considered the most liberal member of the B.N.P. or most charismatic member of the Liberal Democrats. Nevertheless - however shallow the compliment - it was enough to push Johnson way out in front in the race to lead his party through its rapidly-approaching eight years of impotence and opposition.

Having taken the Brownian shilling however, Johnson now finds himself with a portfolio that can best be described as Minister for Shitty Jobs. Now that the traditional poison chalice set to the lips of tall poppies of yore - Minister for Northern Ireland - has been leeched of its venom, prime ministers have to be more creative in sticking it to the junior ranks.

The bad news started for Johnson when he was (literally) pushed to the front in the Afghan War, becoming the first Home Secretary to be honoured with a paddleless visit up that particular creek. Presumably Bob Ainsworth - a Defence secretary who has unwittingly become the most persuasive apologist for every standpoint that he opposes - is now so unwelcome that even close members of his family shy him with date-expired vegetables when he arrives home.

Thus it is that Johnson found himself arguing in defiance of all physiological instinct to blush that he regarded Britain's continued support for C.I.A. operative Ahmed Wali Karzai and his vote-rigging brother as a key element in the war against domestic terrorism.

This is a bit like sending the Minister for Transport out to Afghanistan on the basis that reducing military traffic on British roads is a key element in our motorway policy.

Anyway, no sooner was Johnson done with hitching his wagon to that particular lost cause than Mrs. Brown's little boy peered out from his customary place of hiding with another job that he needed doing. Inclining an ear to the mahogany drawer from which the Prime Minister's glowered up at him, Johnson must have been surprised to hear that he was being asked to write a letter sacking David Nutt.

It is not recorded whether he had the courage to ask "Who?" but Nutt's name had certainly not been tripping off the tongue until Brown decided that it was important to (send a flunky to) sack him.

Thus it was that Johnson found himself appending his John Hancock to a letter motivated by no higher purpose than Gordon's spite and vindictiveness. Go back a few centuries and Johnson would have been hiding his weapons under a sycamore tree and demanding that Thomas Beckett submit to the King's will.

Yet we weep not for Johnson, for this is a man who - contrary to all hopes that other might have placed in him - decided that the percentage play was neither to join the rats leaving the sinking ship nor wrest the wheel from the captain who had driven it aground in the first place. Instead, he chose the honour of serenading on first violin those running up and down the deck attempting to save their birdbaths and toilet seats from the rising waters.

In contravention of the elegantly-phrased Miltonian epigram, he is the first man in history to think it was actually better to serve in Hell than rule in Heaven.

The Rescuers Abroad

This from BBC.co.uk: "The final decision to order the rescue of kidnapped journalist Stephen Farrell was taken by the foreign and defence secretaries, Downing Street has said. Gordon Brown was consulted, but David Milliband and Bob Ainsworth sanctioned it."

Had things gone differently, I suppose Downing Street might have made a different announcement. There would have been Mrs. Brown's little boy, smiling with shy pride and unaffected delight before the hissing flashbulbs of the assembled press, explaining his pivotal role in this Entebbe-esque victory. How Gordon would have beamed.

Failure, however, is an orphan. Worse, it is an orphan who has just been unwillingly adopted by David Milliband and Bob Ainsworth: the sort of punishment that even an orphan asking for more gruel might consider severe.

Special forces operations, like wars, roll a die, and the relationship of risk to reward is a complex one, but in a situation where the best case scenario was freeing two prisoners, it was at best a daring operation to undertake. Saving one out of the two ain't bad I suppose, and if it matters to you that it was the British one that they saved then you may feel that the result was broadly successful.

Nevertheless to save one man from very uncertain death at the price, seemingly, of the deaths of four others - the interpreter, a soldier, two civilians - isn't exactly the sort of thing that gets people hanging out the bunting and draining glasses to the health of the Dear Old Queen. If - as is suspected - Sultan Munadi was killed by the bullets of those attempting to rescue Stephen Farrell, then the success was something worse than equivocal.

The question that most stubbornly occurs, though, is this. What was the basis for the decision made by this pair of politicians (without any collusion whatsoever from our prime minister, who merely peeped out from under his desk while stretching for a cup of tea that had been thoughtfully left on the carpet for him)?

Surely only a cynic could suggest that the Go order was given in the hope of securing a headline-flashing victory in the course of an increasingly miserable occupation?

"Must These Have Voices?"

In retrospect, it wasn't really necessary to wage a massive campaign in Afghanistan to make the country (slightly less un-) safe for voters. It turns out that an honour guard around Hamid Karzai's photocopier would have done just as well.

Personally, Sordel has always felt that we should get democracy working here before imposing it on others. Lest we forget, the man currently cowering under the prime minister's desk was not elected (even by his own party) yet this has not stopped him grabbing the tiller and setting a course for the nearest iceberg. His predecessor was indeed elected, but he spent much of his premiership explaining why (much as he deeply respected the opinions of the overwhelming majority of the electorate) we'd be doing things his way for now. Having promised a referendum before further European integration, Labour decided to ratify the Lisbon Treaty without one, and the low cunning of this decision is confirmed by the failure of Ireland to pass a referendum on the same issue. Et cetera.

This is merely to say that democracy does not operate in the United Kingdom, but let us suppose that it did. Under a constituency system in which the winner takes all, the overwhelming majority of voters will live in a constituency where only two political parties can possibly win. Many people will live in a constituency where one political party has an insurmountable majority.

The smallest parliamentary majority is apparently Crawley, where the current incumbent is handing on by the varnish on her nails to a majority of 37. She's a Labour MP, so I fancy that her chances of holding the seat at the next election are slender. Let us imagine, however, that you live in Crawley at the time of the next election, the seat is won or lost by a single vote, and you find yourself on the winning end. Would this be a validation for you of the democratic system, to have made such a seemingly enormous difference? Or would you consider that the body of votes sloshing backwards and forwards had pretty much made your individual vote worthless? Democracy values all citizens equally, but does not value them highly.

Why, then, are we so persuaded of the value of the democratic system that we are willing to sacrifice lives in order to transform Afghanistan into one? Set aside for a moment patriotic concern for British troops; I am not convinced that is worth the death of a single individual of any nationality to establish a democracy in that country, even were it possible to do so.

Of course, I see that there are significant motives for governments to like democracies, whether domestic or foreign.

But why on Earth should we?

Some Idiot Went To War And All I Got Was This Lousy Tee-Shirt

Like most of Britain's citizens, Sordel is content to fight his wars on the Home Front. I am not entirely convinced, however, that our Prime Minister should be allowed to do the same.

It used to be inferred from his sullen silence on the subject that Gordon Brown was no supporter of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. War, one felt, was incompatible with a man for whom prudence had become not so much a watchword as the nervous tic of a genteel Tourette. The mongering of war sits uncomfortably alongside fiscal responsibility, which is why many voters may have assumed that Brown would draw a line under the adventuring of his predecessor and quietly withdraw our troops from theatres of war with the discretion of an impresario closing a West End flop.

How wrong we all were.

Brown, it is true, is no wartime leader. One cannot imagine Churchill, or Thatcher, or Blair, presiding over a country at war without the occasionally morale-raising speech, the shake of the flag, the salute to the forces. Brown acts, however, like someone for whom war is conducted far away by strange and distant relatives.

It is an impression that can only have been fostered by Blair's own remoteness. One imagines Tony to have been like as a small boy at boarding school writing reluctant postcards to a disciplinarian and slightly mad aunt. "UN nice, food okay, send more money." "Thank you for the seedcake, dug out a rabbit hole on Saturday, send more money." "Met the president, going to war, send more money."

Sat at home with this collection of haikuesque epistles, the dismal Gordon could only have thought of statesmanship as something that happened to other people in distant lands. Mrs. Brown's little boy - admitted to Edinburgh University by the age of sixteen when most of his peers would have been getting their prefect badges and first serious girlfriends - continued along the sad little road upon which his feet had long ago been set.

No war for Gordon. No prefect badge for Gordon. Gordon excused school sport on account of a nasty injury incurred during rugby.

The result is a man gazing uncomprehendingly at war through a window-pane. When a crisis occurs for which he feels himself prepared (if, for example, someone is needed to pass billions of pounds across the table to the banking fraternity) Brown is the man for the job.

But war is something to which he takes no principled exception and to which he can make not the least practical contribution.

Helicopters? The brass might have more luck asking for seedcake.